Originally Posted by
njkayaker
Some people have rather optimistic ideas about what to expect.
Lights draw a lot of power and reasonable generators don't provide much power (probably, you don't want a generator that adds significant effort to riding).
It's probably a much better idea to charge a "cheap" cache battery than it is to expose your expensive devices to wild swings of power.
I think the devices either put out a steady amount of power, or stop putting out power altogether. That's part of the point of the converter.
A cache battery works in some situations but not others. Eventually it needs to be recharged itself, and sometimes that's not possible. Other times it's just a lot easier to run a wire from the front hub up to a phone on the bars, than it is to try to figure out how to mount an extra cache battery there.